Page - 415 - in The Origin of Species

DISPERSAL DURING GLACIAL PERIOD 415 asked how I account for this degree of uniformity in the sub-arctic and temperate forms round the world, at the com- mencement of the real Glacial period. At the present day, the sub-arctic and northern temperate productions of the Old and New Worlds are separated from each other by the whole Atlantic Ocean and by the northern part of the Pacific. During the Glacial period, when the inhabitants of the Old and New Worlds lived farther southwards than they do at present, they must have been still more completely separated from each other by wider spaces of ocean; so that it may well be asked how the same species could then or previously have entered the two continents. The explanation, I believe, lies in the nature of the climate before the commencement of the Glacial period. At this, the newer Pliocene period, the majority of the inhabitants of the world were specifically the same as now, and we have good reason to believe that the climate was warmer than at the present day. Hence we may suppose that the organisms which now live under lati- tude 60°. lived during the Pliocene period farther north under the Polar Circle, in latitude 66°-6y* ; and that the present arctic productions then lived on the broken land still nearer to the pole. Now, if we look at a terrestrial globe, we see under the Polar Circle that there is almost continuous land from western Europe, through Siberia, to eastern Amer- ica. And this continuity of the circumpolar land, with the consequent freedom under a more favourable climate for intermigration, will account for the supposed uniformity of the sub-arctic and temperate productions of the Old and New Worlds, at a period anterior to the Glacial epoch. Believing, from reasons before alluded to, that our conti- nents have long remained in nearly the same relative posi- tion, though subjected to great oscillations of level, I am strongly inclined to extend the above view, and to infer that during some still earlier and still warmer period, such as the older Pliocene period, a large number of the same plants and animals inhabited the almost continuous circumpolar land; and that these plants and animals, both in the Old and New Worlds, began slowly to migrate southwards as the climate became less warm, long before the commencement of the Glacial period. We now see, as I believe, their descendants,